BUCHTEL, Ohio — Nelsonville Music Festival returns to Snow Fork Event Center next weekend, June 18–20, for its 20th anniversary. And for the first time, presale weekend passes are sold out.
Stuart’s Opera House and Nelsonville Music Festival Artistic Director Tim Peacock, who founded the festival, told the Independent that it has also already sold out of Thursday single-day tickets, which he said may be attributed to the popularity of the headliner Geese, a rock band that also played the festival in 2023.
The festival officially began in 2005 and skipped two years because of COVID-19.
Peacock said this year’s “eclectic” lineup includes three days of music, ideally with something for everyone.
“Friday is mellower, folky with Gillian Welch and Mavis Staples, and other folks,” Peacock said. He said Saturday’s headliner, the Marcus King Band, is somewhere “in between.”
A couple of surprises are planned for the festival’s 20th anniversary. Each festival is themed; “This year, it’s circusy, so there might be some circus-y kind of stuff happening at the festival,” Peacock said.
Peacock considers the annual event to be more than just an entertaining music festival. It supports Stuart’s Opera House and its programming, like youth arts education, which he considers “super important” work.
“We offer things that wouldn’t otherwise be happening in Nelsonville and maybe in Athens County, and that’s the one thing that I’m proud of.”
The early years: 2005–2007
The first festival in 2005, called the Art and Music on the Square, was a one-day event that highlighted galleries in the Nelsonville Public Square.
“We didn’t have a five-year plan for the festival, so the name changed, I think, in the second year,” Peacock said.
The festival later became the Nelsonville Art and Music Festival and was held behind the Rocky Boots store, in a field along the Hocking River, for years two and three.
Brian Koscho served as the marketing director for Stuart’s Opera House and the festival from 2007–2019. For the first two years, he was an AmeriCorps VISTA. His first day on the job was the third annual festival.
”I would have been 24 years old — a ripe, green, 24 years old — and those first couple years were really cool … I’d always played music, I’d always put on shows in much smaller capacities, but to be doing that suddenly as your job is pretty cool,” Koscho said.
According to archives of Ohio University’s student newspaper The Post, the third annual Nelsonville Art and Music Festival took place at Stuart’s in July 2007 and admission for the one-day event cost $20.
Hocking College: 2008–2019
The fourth annual festival took place in May 2008 and hosted an audience of 2,000; admission was $50 for a weekend pass, and it was still called the Nelsonville Art and Music Festival. The Post described it as “mini-Bonnaroo.” That year, the festival took place at Hocking College.
“Moving to Hocking was also moving to a weekend-long festival, so that was like a big difference,” Koscho said. That weekend had served as the former Hockhocking Folk Festival, a volunteer-run event that Stuart’s had also supported.
“[It] was three days with the Avett Brothers in 2008, and then in 2009 it was Willie Nelson, so it was like this crazy jump each year that we were kind of still figuring out how it worked,” Koscho said.
The move to Hocking College “was a big change, that was a pivoting year,” Peacock said, and in 2009 he brought a proposal to the Stuart’s board: “That we go after someone bigger to try to get more people to come, and that’s when we got Willie Nelson.”
The seventh annual festival took place in May 2011 and featured three days of torrential downpours that resulted in inescapable mud on the festival grounds.
“I specifically remember the first time the Flaming Lips were there in 2011 — that was really, really muddy,” Koscho said. “People had just seen this incredible Flaming Lips show in a muddy field in Nelsonville, 2011. They did not care at all. Everything was muddy at the campgrounds, but it’s a great memory.”
Mudville is even the name of the festival’s campground at Snow Fork Event Center. Koscho said that name might’ve originated from that fateful, wet 2011 festival.
“Mudville is the campground and has been the campground at NMF for a certain amount of time, and that name is incredibly organic,” Koscho said.
The second stage, the Porch Stage, is also named so “because it originally was on a porch at Hocking.”
Rain is something the festival braces for every year, Koscho said, since it has always taken place in late spring into the summer. In 2013, “I remember there being quite a bit of wetland,” Koscho said. “Nelsonville lost power that year.”
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the festival hosted other country giants such as Goerge Jones and Loretta Lynn, and other soon-to-be country giants, such as Tyler Childers.
Snow Fork Event Center: 2022–present
The festival has taken place at Snow Fork Event Center since 2022, a property largely bordered by the Wayne National Forest and Snow Fork Creek. Some areas were once used for coal mining, and at one point, the space was considered to become a golf course, Kochsco said. (For those wanting to learn more, Koscho is leading a history walk at the festival at 9 a.m. Friday, starting at the volunteer tent.)
“There is a historic cemetery up on the ridge, a house that is gone that’s across from that, it was an Underground Railroad house,” Koscho said. “Just like anywhere else in Athens County, there’s lots of good stuff all around the landscape, and I’ll talk all about it and the festival, too.”
Peacock said the transition from Hocking to Snow Fork Event Center “was a big change.” The site required work in order to accommodate the festival as it transitioned from being hosted at a college with hundreds of parking spots to a comparatively undeveloped space.
Peacock considers the Snow Fork location “far more beautiful and gorgeous and accommodating for a music festival … but it definitely has taken a lot of work,” he said.
Peacock noted that as the festival location has changed over the years, the costs to produce it have grown — and as a result, so have costs to attend.
In an email sent on behalf of Nelsonville Music Festival April 17, Peacock elaborated upon the festival’s costs and how those they have increased from 2019 to 2025:
- Payroll (not accounting for Stuart’s Opera House salaried employees): 89% increase.
- Production: 88% increase.
- Tent rental: 88% increase.
- Golf cart rental: 67% increase.
- Port-a-potties: 53% increase.
According to Peacock’s email, early-bird weekend tickets in 2019 started at $130. By 2025, that cost had grown by nearly 31%, to $170.
“In an attempt to keep up, we have gradually increased the price of festival add-ons, such as parking and camping, but even with these increases, it is still an incredibly tight margin,” Peacock wrote.
This year, weekend tickets for the festival began at $180, about a 6% difference from 2025. Single day tickets start at $120.
Camping costs $30, as it did in 2025. Lower-cost tickets were available for Nelsonville and Buchtel resident tickets — which cost $85 last year — sold out at this year’s $100 price point.
Parking costs, at $35–$75, remained the same from 2025 to 2026.
Per U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $1 in May 2019 has the same buying power as $1.31 in May 2026. The current inflation rate is over 4%, as of May 2026.
“We try really hard to [keep] our prices as low as possible, but everything just goes up exponentially, and there’s a lot of festivals that have canceled because of the cost of producing the festival,” Peacock said.
The nearby Healing Appalachia music festival, produced by Hope in the Hills, canceled its event in Ashland, Kentucky, this year, citing economic constraints. It plans to return next year.
“All of it costs more … so you have to either get more people to come and buy a ticket, or you have to increase the ticket price to pay for it, and it’s hard,” Peacock said. “I can see a future where we just can’t keep doing it.”
As the festival approaches its 20th incarnation, Koscho attends it now more as a fan than organizer.
“I feel like it’s a really unique thing that I’m able to kind of have, to see this side of this thing after being on the other side of it so long,” Koscho said.
Peacock encouraged festival goers to see up-and-coming artists — perhaps before they make it big.
“My favorite bands that play are the ones that are not the headliners — usually daytime on the Porch Stage,” Peacock said. “It’s the smaller unknown band that I think are most interesting, just because they’re still younger, they’re still grinding it out, they’re still wanting to really kick ass as performers.”
Koscho offered advice as well:
“Make sure you get to the different stages, go visit your friends in the campground, … or go to the late night side, go to the vendors and the creek side, and all that stuff, and try to catch a set, like in each of those different places … Go see something that you don’t know anything about, that you might not be as familiar with.”
Find more information at nelsonvillefest.org.
